Covid-19 vaccines: Where is the plan?

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, the United States still had a president who could be considered a Covid-19 denialist.

The country replaced China as the global epicentre of Covid and, to date, has lost almost 600 000 people to the pandemic.

When Joe Biden took over as president six months ago, he hit the ground running and declared that his goal is to have all Americans vaccinated by 4 July, their Independence Day.

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They might not reach that target and a new virus variant might throw a spanner in the works, but America is vaccinating up to a million people a day.

From the madness of denialism just year ago, to more than half the targeted 332 million having already had their first jab, there must be something they are doing right, which South Africa is not doing.

The biggest lesson coming from the US is that even if the head of government is not doing the right thing, the rest of government must get on with the business of governing.

There is a feeling of despondency in the nation because there doesn’t seem to be a credible vaccination plan in place. It’s easy to say “but Health Minister Zweli Mkhize is on leave so the chaos is expected”.

The lesson from America is that government is not one individual. Mkhize may have been projected as the face of the Covid-19 fightback, but he is not all of government.

Where is the rest of government? The country has gone through too many lockdowns and is now entering the third wave of the pandemic, yet it still does not appear that there ever was a plan put together to get the country out of this mess.

It might appear that government is trying, but gets hampered by things beyond their Tuesday 10 15 June 2021 control, like two million contaminated vaccines, but the question needs to be asked: what was the initial plan?

Two million is only five percent of the targeted 40 million jabs. Yes, it’s a setback, but what does the rest of the plan say?

The danger with keeping quiet right now and not questioning or pushing government to act with urgency is that this time next week, the country might be sitting with an even bigger crisis.

The economy has taken a real beating because of the pandemic. Unemployment is at an all-time high. Electricity blackouts are a reality the country must now accept – yes, blackouts, not the sanitised “load shedding” that the power utility has convinced the country to accept.

Without a credible vaccination plan right now, South Africa will have to continue going through unending rounds of stricter lockdowns which will leave the country in an even worse position. That must not be allowed to happen.

It must be accepted that Mkhize had to step aside. But it is totally unacceptable that the country only gets an acting minister of health without an urgent address to the nation on what the plan is.

It is as though the head of government has forgotten that there is pandemic going on. The president can announce all the plans that he has made to try and revive the economy, but those will all come to zero if the population has no protection against Covid-19.

If the US can vaccinate one million people a day after a Trump presidency, South Africa can also turn things around.

But that can only happen when government accepts and acknowledges the current mess they have created by not taking charge when they were supposed to.